Hashtag activism: tactical maneuvering in an online anti-mandatory hijab movement

Abstract

This article focuses on the My Stealthy Freedom movement, an anti-mandatory hijab movement in Iran that is organized as an online movement. We explore the utility of a tactical approach for explaining the movement’s pace of insurgency. We employ a conceptual repertoire focused upon the political process model’s core concepts of tactical innovation and tactical adaptations. We supplement these older concepts with the recently proposed concept of tactical freeze and propose an additional concept of tactical hashtags. We gather as a dataset through text-mining techniques the Instagram posts of the movement’s founder and the reactions of people to those posts. The data include the number of posts, “likes,” and comments in response to movement hashtags created between 2015 and 2019. We conclude that the movement’s emergence and early growth were enhanced by its tactical innovations, which heavily relied on hashtag activism. We discover that a specific type of hashtag—tactical hashtags—was of particular importance. The movement was unsuccessful, however, in changing the government’s pro-hijab policy. In its tactical adaptations, the government passed more hijab regulations and stiffened penalties for resistance. The movement was undercut by these tactical adaptations and by a tactical freeze wherein it failed to develop tactical innovations capable of surmounting government repression.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Farinaz Basmechi

Farinaz Basmechi, University of North Texas, Department of Sociology. Farinaz Basmechi is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of North Texas. Her mixed-methods research investigates the use of social media as a platform for women's movements in non-democratic political conditions. Farinaz's doctoral thesis, Not Just About a Piece of Cloth: Iranian Women Resisting Mandatory Hijab Laws, incorporates intersectional analysis into the study of social movements, gender, and digital activism focusing on the My Stealthy Freedom (MSF) movement, an anti-mandatory hijab movement in Iran.

Donna Barnes

Donna A. Barnes, University of North Texas, Department of Sociology. Donna A. Barnes has held tenure-system faculty positions at several different universities. After serving as Chair for almost a decade at the University of Wyoming, she joined the Department of Sociology at the University of North Texas in Fall 2017 as its new Chair. Her primary research area is Social Movements. She is the author of two books on the nineteenth century Populist Movement: Farmers in Rebellion (University of Texas Press, 1984) and The Louisiana Populist Movement (Louisiana State University, 2011), as well as journal articles, book chapters, and essays related to social movements.

Morteza Heydari

Morteza Heydari, University of North Texas, Department of Mechanical Engineering. Morteza is a PhD candidate at the Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering at the University of North Texas. His research interests include data analysis and computational fluid dynamics. He also serves as a teaching fellow at the Department of Engineering Technology, University of North Texas.